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We are lost in raptures of techno-narcissism. We’re convinced that all the unanticipated consequences of our brief techno-industrial orgy can be solved by… more and better technology! Notice that this narrative is being served up to a society now held hostage to the images on little screens, by skilled people who, more and more, act as though these screens have become the new dwelling place of reality.

It becomes ever more tempting to conclude that the timing of the Fed’s rate hike was really quite odd, even from the perspective of the planners...

Because we squandered our opportunity to correct our own problems, our problems shall be our legacy. It’s wretched how dumb we are in our greed to have everything right now in the cheapest way possible and how willing we are to force the debts of that consumption upon our grandchildren and to pretend that won’t hurt them. We live in economic denial.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We were all told by the “experts” and the so-called “smart crowd” ad nauseam the economy and markets of 2015 were “ready for lift off.” Proclamations that GDP and other economic metrics were indeed going to be the unquestionable catalyst to help propel not only the markets themselves ever higher, but also, prove all the nay-sayers as well as data-deniers wrong. The problem? It was the exact opposite. 2015 exposed the sole overarching fundamental principle the “experts” refused to calculate into their qualitative analysis. That fundamental? Without the continuing interventionism of the Federal Reserve – there is no market. Period.

Now that the gold-trading company at the nexus of what may have been the world's biggest gold smuggling ring in history has imploded seemingly overnight, vaporizing countless tons of physical gold and unknown amounts of client cash, even more questions remain.

“The [aerial] imagery was made in the vicinity of Zakho (a city in Iraqi Kurdistan), there were 11,775 tankers and trucks on both sides of the Turkish-Iraqi border. It must be noted that oil from both Iraq and Syria come through this [Zakho] checkpoint."

101 years after the Christmas truces along the Western Front there is still no peace on earth. And the long suffering American taxpayers, who foot the massive bills generated by the War Party’s demented and destructive policies, have no clue that Imperial Washington is the principal reason.

Following the yellow brick road leads us deep, very deep inside the rabbit hole...

At 23-years old, Pete Seeger was an Army Private anxiously awaiting the opportunity to be deployed to fight fascism in the midst of World War II, when he became outraged by injustice in his own backyard. As such, he wrote the following letter to the California chapter of the American Legion. For this thoughtful expression of his First Amendment rights, Pete Seeger ended up on an FBI watch-list; a place he would remain for the next thirty years. Following a Freedom of Information Act request, we now have access to his shocking 1,800 page file...

Dear Santa Claus, I am an activist investor in your company who has been infuriated for many years by your wilfully eccentric approach to capital allocation, pricing, brand strategy and supply chain management. Life at St Nicholas is one long party. Free food for your elves, who receive generous compensation to make bespoke, non-standardised products. Presents offered to anyone who writes you a begging letter and has been “good” according to some vague metric. Jingle bells, rides in one-horse open sleighs, eggnog cocktails: Oh, what fun you have with my money.

The situation is clear: the 2008 Crisis was the warm up. The next Crisis will be THE REAL Crisis. The Crisis in which Central Banking itself will fail.

After a year of proclamations from mainstream media (and Wall St. economists) that low oil prices mean low gas prices at the pump which means "bonanza" for US consumers, it appears none of that happened. Confidence is fading fast despite what some suggest is $550 average savings this year as 'gains' flooded into soaring rent and healthcare costs. But, more recently, as stock markets celebrate a soaring oil price (off decade lows), wholesale gasoline prices have soared 10% in a little over 48 hours...

There is just one very big problem with this "solution"...

There is one thing that could dramatically slow down China's metal exports - tariffs, anti-dumping duties and other forms of protectionism.  “What may slow down the exports is anti-dumping and protectionist measures that several countries have taken against cheap imports,” said Ernst & Young’s Agrawal. In other words, a trade war... which is precisely what the U.S. just launched by hiking tariffs on Chinese steel imports by a whopping 256%.